EC2 from AWS makes provisioning and managinig cloud servers cost-effective and quick.
August 29, 2018
EC2 from AWS makes provisioning and managinig cloud servers cost-effective and quick.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Overall Satisfaction with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
We are a Managed Services Provider in the Philadelphia area that specializes in moving clients to the cloud. As part of our Cloud Stack, we heavily deploy AWS technologies including EC2. I personally manages multiple AWS accounts that all have EC2 instances in both development and production. EC2 tackles a huge problem when it comes to right-sizing your servers. With EC2, we can spin up a server in the cloud for a client, let them test it, and if it turns out the specs aren't right, within 5 minutes we can have everything changed to a completely different set of specs.
- EC2 makes right-sizing your servers a breeze. You can quickly spin up a server in the cloud and if it turns out the vCPU, RAM, or storage space is wrong, within minutes you can change all of that.
- EC2 makes backups and restores a breeze. We actually had a client that allowed a hacker to remote into their production server. We were able to shutdown the EC2 instance, spin up a backup from an AMI, and then attach the existing elastic IP. This was all done within a 15 minute window.
- EC2 makes quickly deploying multiple servers a very easy. Within minutes, you can deploy a whole fleet of cloud servers.
- EC2 is easy to script. We are able to save our clients a lot of money by scripting their EC2 instance to shutdown/startup at predetermined times so they are only paying for the server when they are using it.
- EC2 in my opinion, is lacking the ability to connect to a console from within the AWS console. I sometimes miss how I can connect to the console with VMware and Hyper-V but not with EC2. You have to utilize RDP or SSH to connect to an instance.
- Sometimes EC2 instances lockup due to reasons with the underlying hardware and need to be shutdown and the started back up so the instance can spin up on new hardware. This is sometimes a problem because unless you set up proper alerting/scripting, you don't know there is an issue until a user reports it.
- EC2 can be a bit daunting for the beginning user. You really do need some kind of training before you dive in.
- AWS has had a very positive return on investment for every client we have that uses it. They are saving money in the long run.
- AWS includes the underlying operating system licenses with their EC2 instances so no longer do we have to navigate through Microsoft licensing headache.
- EC2 allows us to easily create a golden image of servers and store them as AMIs. This makes spinning up new servers that need a particular set of software in the future extremely easy and cost-effective.